Thursday, 25 June 2009

Since the excellent site FlashGameBlogs, which aggregated many developer blogs, has mysteriously stopped working, I am trying to fill the gap with a new rss feed. I'm using pipes and feedburner. Pipes is one of the most unusual pieces of software I've ever used - a visual programming environment for creating mash-ups - all running within the browser with just javascript.

Anyway, this is the call for requests. Please have a look at the feed and tell me: have I missed anyone? I'm looking for feeds of bloggers who write mostly or entirely about Flash and other web games (e.g. Unity3d) - be that coding, art, business, whatever. Comments please!

Wednesday, 24 June 2009

For some reason the incredible power of Open Source is on my mind today. In light of that, here are some open source(ish*) ActionScript libraries I've come across that can help you make games. I haven't tried them all, but maybe you will? *check the licenses before using.

To get code from google code you may have to use a subversion client. On PC use the free TortoiseSVN.

PaperVision3D -if you want to go into the third dimension, this is the daddy. Also check out Away3D - it has some features that haven't yet made it to PaperVision3D. Hey, different strokes for different folks!

TweenMax - since fusekit was was sadly never ported to AS3, this tweening powerhouse has taken over the whole show. Not only is it great for animating your user-interface, menus etc, I have actually built whole minigames using only this library for all movement and animation. Also gives you quick ways to adjust brightness/contrast etc of images. Only downside is that it is time-based only so won't play nicely with your game if it has a frame-based tick - but this option has been added to the beta, and as you read this is probably now in the live version. If you need frame-based tweening, you can also check out GTween, although Grant is discontinuing the project.

Monday, 15 June 2009

I found a little perculiarity in the latest release of PaperVision3D today, and came up with a fix, so I thought I'd post it. The way it currently works, rollovers and rollouts may not be detected if you have a moving camera (which I normally do - hey it looks cooler!).

To fix, all you need to do is open org.papervision3d.core.utils.InteractiveSceneManager and delete or comment out line 236 if ( hasMouseMoved() ) in the handleMouseOver function and line 247 if( !hasMouseMoved() ) return; in the handleMouseOut function.

Now you will get nice responsive mouse events even if you have a nice drifty camera. I have tipped off Seb from the PV3D via twitter so I think those clever people are going to look into it.

By the way, if you haven't tried combining PaperVision3D with TweenMax, I highly recomend you do! I've had some freakin' incredible results that I wish I could post (but I can't).